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Methods to Their Badness

May 11, 2011

In the magazine this week, I’ve written capsule reviews of three movies that fail miserably to provide and, for that matter, to convey any substantial experience of the sort that makes art art: “City of Life and Death,” “Hesher,” and “Something Borrowed.” There are, unfortunately, lots of ways to make bad movies; these three are bad in different ways, and these differences are interesting to consider—sadly, more interesting to consider than the films themselves.

“City of Life and Death” is the least-interesting case; it’s a propaganda movie, in which a Chinese filmmaker shows what it was like for Japanese soldiers to perpetrate a wide range of atrocities against the residents of Nanjing during the 1937 invasion—the Rape of Nanjing—and also depicts the sufferings that their Chinese victims (including members of the army, who were summarily executed) endured. The movie reveals, scene by scene, a calculus of interests; it features, very early on, an act of cavalier indifference by the Kuomintang, just to make sure that the Communist revolution finds its ultimate justification in the first reel. (There follows the prominently self-serving behavior of a porcine businessman; the people—or, rather, “the people”—remain uniformly brave and heroic.) And, though it depicts the Japanese army engaged in barbaric and sadistic violence (and reacting to it like business as usual), there’s one soldier of conscience whose existence is a sop to the norms of diplomacy. There’s something especially repellent about the manipulation and vulgarization—and, thus, the trivialization—of historical horrors. Its director, Lu Chuan, is skilled, in an old-fashioned sense—he deploys the formidable resources placed at his disposal to make images that dispense their narrative and emotional content with portentous, emphatic precision and an absolute lack of overrun, of potential for ambiguity or imaginative speculation. It’s a feature-length commercial for the People’s Liberation Army. (The most interesting thing about the movie is the range of responses to it in China, as reported by Edward Wong in the Times. I hadn’t read Wong’s article until getting this post well under way—and am fascinated to learn from it that Lu is in fact a graduate of a military academy and did eight years of military service.)

As for “Hesher,” it’s a Sundance film, which means that it applies Hollywood talent and Hollywood technique to subjects that are only superficially too “risky” (i.e., violent, sexual, sordid, or depressing) for studios to take on, and that it normalizes the outsider and celebrates the ostensibly transgressive as a form of liberation and self-fulfillment. It tells the story of a violent, uncontrolled, but—of course—not truly evil, and, indeed, good-hearted wild man, who just happens to look and act different from everyone else. The movie is filled with money troubles, disease, death, depression, and a ton of other bad things that befall good people, and the title character seems like just another misfortune, only guess what? The folks he meets have to learn, as do we viewers, that just because he looks and acts different from other people doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy. He’s played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who lets his hair and beard grow and lets his acting chops hang out, as he extricates himself from the ranks of aging teen stars and makes a feature-length reel of his range; he shows off impressive training in a role that is nothing but a collection of gestures. And the director, Spencer Susser, seems to have worked long and hard with him and the other actors, which may be what it took to sell the utterly artificial, piously edifying story, but, as a director, he seems more or less to have let the cameraman press the button; there isn’t an image in the film that adds any value to the script or the performances. The film’s benign cynicism in the name of tolerance does neither liberalism nor the cinema any favors.

The first thing to say about the blanded-out romantic machinations of “Something Borrowed” is that the premise is promising in its simplicity: a single lawyer who is to be the maid of honor at her best friend’s wedding turns out to share a longstanding crush with the prospective groom, and when they consummate it, decisions must be made. The movie is made with chirpy cheer while remaining, in effect, a melodrama; the comic tone (which, unfortunately, delivers no actual laughter) is the imprimatur that comforts viewers in advance that all will work out happily in the end. The director, Luke Greenfield, seems perfectly comfortable with his characters and unwilling to push them; he directs amiably, as if one step from the golf course; and yet he does seem familiar with their places and their ways, and, whether by accident or by design, he lets a fine performer, Ginnifer Goodwin (who plays the maid of honor), occasionally do nothing and thereby convey moments of expansive thought in dramatic confusion. It’s a kind of thought without content (the script, as A. O. Scott pointed out in the Times last week, scrupulously avoids any hint of greater substance) but one that, nonetheless, suggests, however fleetingly, the movie this could have been. The stark, practical, life-determining situation cries out to be taken seriously, even in or as a comedy (see “The Break-Up”).

The “independent” filmmaker, Susser, straining for the brass ring of Sundance recognition and off-Hollywood distribution, seems as cynical as the propagandist Lu, but with lesser skills; the factitious premises of their films would have required extreme directorial interventions and inspirations to turn them into anything of merit. The Hollywood filmmaker, Greenfield, comes off as utterly bewildered, yet his unforced proximity to his simple subject comes closer than the other two films to conveying a sense of presence and experience; he at least alludes, if unconsciously, to the film that could have been. And such a subject wouldn’t have needed a genius to realize it decently, just a perceptive and inquisitive filmmaker. And that’s the story of many of Hollywood’s so-called classics, and why it makes sense, even now, to talk of the genius of the system (which is what functions in the absence of individual genius, like a sort of cinematic backup generator or insurance policy).